Santiago Z.
Senior AWS DevOps/SRE | Data Pipelines | AI Agents -- 15+ yrs
Senior DevOps/SRE and data/platform engineer with 15+ years of experience building reliable, high-performance systems on AWS. The last 5+ years I worked inside Upwork's engineering org on logging, monitoring, data, and AI-agent platforms — turning noisy production data into systems engineers and leadership actually rely on day to day. Recent work I'm proud of: • Logging pipelines at scale — designed and built S3-to-Parquet conversion pipelines that dramatically cut analytics query latency and storage cost, making log-driven debugging and metrics practical across the org. • Anomaly detection from user events — built an internal service that consumes user-generated events to surface production incidents earlier than traditional monitoring. • Data engineering & dashboards — authored the queries and dashboards leadership uses to track engineering performance, GPU utilization, and other cross-cutting metrics. • AI agents on real codebases — designed and shipped a documentation-generator agent that reads a service's repo and produces accurate, maintained docs, saving engineering hours per service. What I bring to your project: • AWS, deep — ECS (Fargate & EC2), ALB/NLB, Route53, VPC/networking, Landing Zone, well-architected reviews, security hardening, serverless (Lambda, Step Functions, DynamoDB, SNS/SQS) • Infrastructure as Code — Terraform and CloudFormation, modular and scalable • CI/CD — Jenkins and the AWS CodeSuite (CodePipeline / CodeBuild / CodeDeploy / CodeCommit) • Data — S3/Parquet pipelines, SQL, dashboarding, cost-aware analytics • AI / LLM — agent design, retrieval over code and docs, prompt and tool-call engineering • Languages — Python (primary), Bash, some Django • Observability — CloudWatch, Datadog, Zabbix • Containers & config mgmt — Docker, Ansible I like owning a problem end-to-end — from architecture through delivery and operation — and writing infra and code that other engineers can read, extend, and trust. If you have a hard problem in AWS, data pipelines, observability, or AI agents, I'd love to hear about it. Previously AWS-certified (DevOps Engineer Professional, Security Specialty, Solutions Architect Associate, SysOps Administrator Associate) and Terraform Associate. Certifications have lapsed; the experience hasn't.
Earnings and projects
Last 6 months ÷ 6
Last 6 months: $50k
$25k in the last 6 months
Across 38 contracts
Earnings, last 30 days
Skill rankings: Top 0.87% in Docker
Ranked by MRR among everyone on Upwork with the skill.
- Progress Chef53 freelancers · 🇦🇷 #1Top 4%🇦🇷#1 of 1
- Security Infrastructure187 freelancers · 🇦🇷 #1Top 2%🇦🇷#1 of 1
- #15Ansible931 freelancers · 🇦🇷 #1Top 2%🇦🇷#1 of 5
- #17Elasticsearch946 freelancers · 🇦🇷 #1Top 2%🇦🇷#1 of 10
- #28Linux System Administration2,578 freelancers · 🇦🇷 #1Top 1%🇦🇷#1 of 31
- #30Terraform2,052 freelancers · 🇦🇷 #2Top 1%🇦🇷#2 of 15
- #68DevOps4,403 freelancers · 🇦🇷 #1Top 2%🇦🇷#1 of 31
- #76Docker8,761 freelancers · 🇦🇷 #2Top 0.87%🇦🇷#2 of 73